Francoise Boucher

Biography

Françoise Boucher belonged to the first Canadian-born generation of her family. Her parents, Marin Boucher and Perrine Mallet, had come from the Perche, a historic region west of Paris in France; she was baptized at Québec in June 1636. In September 1650 she married Jean Plante, another migrant from France. Their household became part of the growing farming community along the Côte de Beaupré, the north bank of the St. Lawrence River downstream from Québec city.

Land passed between the generations in a particularly concrete way. On April 25, 1656, Françoise and Jean received a gift from her parents: a strip two arpents wide along the front of the Boucher concession near Château-Richer. The notarial summary names both mother and father as donors, and both daughter and son-in-law as recipients. Françoise’s place in the transaction was explicit. The gift connected the couple’s establishment with property her parents had acquired after their own migration.

By 1681, Françoise and Jean had a large household. The census lists ten children still with them, ranging from young Louise to adult sons, alongside four cattle and twenty arpents under cultivation. Other children had already begun households of their own. Her mother Perrine also appears nearby in the census enumeration, preserving a glimpse of several generations within the same community.

Françoise’s children were born over roughly twenty-five years, from Claude in 1653 to Marie-Louise in 1678. She outlived Jean, who died in 1706, and died at Château-Richer in April 1711. The land gift and the census together locate her life in a specific stretch of settled riverbank, among parents, children and neighboring Boucher families.